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KIPKELION, KENYA — With the sun barely over the edge of the valley, the colours on the hills were muffled. The banana leaves were dull green, the sugar cane stalks pale yellow. And so the flames, when we saw them flare in first one house, then a second, then streets and streets on fire, were shocking, vivid orange, more alive than anything around.
I arrived in Mau Summit, a small town on a main road in Kenya's Great Rift Valley, just after dawn on Thursday morning. It had been burning for a couple of hours. At the sight of the flames, my driver, Mohammed AbuBakr, instinctively sped up. But in the centre of town, we found a police truck and a half-dozen officers and we stopped.
There were people all along the side of the road, but no one spoke. The only sound was the dull thud as they flipped over the fallen tin sheets that used to be roofs, looking for anything to salvage. The sight of the ruins seemed to stun people into silence.
I climbed through the rubble and held out a hand to a young man who stood in the smouldering remains of his small electronics shop. "Pole, pole sana," I said, Kiswahili for "very sorry," a phrase I had been using incessantly in the past few days. There was nothing to save, no trace of the 300,000 shillings — $4,350 — that Jose Muiruri, 25, had saved up and invested. Next door was the shell of his family's house.
Women load up their few surviving possessions and prepare to walk under police escort from the burning remains of Mau Summit on Thursday morning. A mob of Kalenjin men carrying bows and arrows and jerry cans of petrol set the town, where most businesses belonged to people from the Kikuyu ethnic group, alight early Thursday. (Stephanie Nolen/The Globe and Mail)
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Then it got worse: Behind it, he found the body of a young woman. She was so badly burned that he could not tell who she was; her skirt and sweater were reduced to ash. But the baby, perhaps a year old, whom she clutched to her chest, small head tucked beneath her chin, was still discernible. Mr. Muiruri looked, and turned away. There was no one to help, nowhere to take their bodies. He needed to gather his family and get out.
"Last evening we heard noises, and we thought there was something planned, so we just stayed in the shop watching," he said. "But then a group came — so many, 20 in one group, 30 in another — and you could not recognize them, and they told us we must leave this place. So we turned and just ran for our life."
His family and many others ran to a gas station at the edge of town, where a few police officers had been posted in the convulsion of violence that has racked Kenya since a disputed presidential election on Dec. 27. The police called for reinforcements, but by the time they arrived an hour later, a mob of young men armed with bows and arrows and jerry cans of fuel had set the once-bustling town on fire.
Police tried to talk to the mob leaders, but the mob shot arrows, a traditional weapon of the Kalenjin, who are numerous in this area, toward the police and shop owners, most of them Kikuyu, and kept them at bay, until the shops and bars and the small hotels were all ablaze. Then they melted back into the valley.
"They were telling us to go, go," Mr. Muiruri said. "To go back where we are from." I asked where that was. He gave a bitter smile. "I was born just there," he said, pointing up the road. "But they say we are invaders and we have taken something of theirs."
It was a story I had heard a dozen times in the previous couple of days. Some 800 people are dead, 300,000 are displaced in Kenya now, and millions of dollars worth of property has been destroyed. And in nearly every case, the story is that anger over cheating in the presidential election has caused people who have lived side by side for decades to turn on each other in a vicious frenzy, shooting and beating and burning, and driving them from land and homes they have occupied for generations.
The Kenya I travelled through this week was not a country I recognized from more than a decade of travel here, the Kenya that was prospering and ambitious and dignified and peaceful. No one I have met seems able to believe that they have found themselves here — or able to imagine a way out.
